Noosa Mining and Exploration Conference, 2017. According to Adam Smith – the father of Economics, and obviously no fan of mining – the search after new mines is “perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world.” (from “The Wealth of […]

Excerpt from a presentation to the International Mining Congress and Exhibition of Turkey, April 2017 Technology allows things to be done that were previously not possible to do. For example: the analysis of the complex interaction between multiple trucks and […]

Excerpt from the paper: Economics, Technological Change, and the Knowledge Problem. Faster computers allow us to process more data, and to carry out more analyses than has been possible up until now. But every problem to be solved includes […]

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was a famous Italian economist who, amongst other things, derived some interesting relationships between income levels and the number of people who received more than that income. Anecdotal evidence credits Pareto with the original recognition that 80% […]

Irving Fisher (1867-1947) was one of the greatest and clearest-thinking economists of all time. He established the theoretical support for modern discounted cash flow analysis, writing that “the value of capital is the present value of the flow of (net) […]

We are always exploiting the easiest reserves of everything – coal, oil, gas, copper, or any other commodity. As these reserves are exhausted won’t the cost of extraction from new deeper, more complex deposits increase substantially? Will we be able […]